This is no mere ???budget formula change,??? as the Washington Post headline would have us believe. WSF is a comprehensive reform, one that banishes old-fashioned funding schemes and makes possible a host of other reforms. By developing school-level budgets based on per-pupil funding amounts, tailored to the needs of students, WSF is efficient, fair, and transparent, unlike district-centered models that control funding from a central office and allocate teachers and other resources to schools based on staffing formulas or the whims of bureaucrats.

Under WSF, inequities in funding between schools can be erased, as funding levels are based explicitly on the students each school serves. In contrast, the type of system to which Rhee would return allocates teachers to schools and then lets school ???budgets??? be driven (primarily) by the sums of their salaries. Certain schools can far ???outspend??? others for no better reason than that veteran teachers chose to teach there. Marguerite Roza and others have found that such nuances can lead to huge funding inequities between schools in the same district ??? inequities that may be worse than those between districts or between states.

Mike makes good points about Thompson's article. But modesty about the lengths to which the KIPP/Amistad/SEED models can be stretched is warranted. District public schools should copy many of the "no excuses" methods at work in high-achieving charter schools, but KIPP and its ilk have luxuries that district schools do not; for example, they can easily expel students who don't subscribe to their academically demanding, disciplined philosophies.

And let us not get carried away with the paternalism idea. Mike writes:

The KIPPs and the Amistads and the Cristo Reys take in loco parentis to an extreme, intervening in all corners of their students' lives if that's what it takes. We need inner-city schools to be more paternalistic, not less.

This type of??talk should, and will, make lots of people uncomfortable.

An education system cannot overcome the breakdown of the family, and the social fabric that surrounds children daily.

This is the way to "revive the conservative cause"? Through Charles Murray-style defeatism? Of course parents are a child's first and most important teachers. Of course we're never going to eradicate our social ills until we stem the decline of the family. Still, there are three big problems with Thompson's statement.

First, we aren't, by and large, even trying to use our education system to overcome family breakdown. In the inner-city, where such meltdowns are most acute, typical public schools remain awful and resistant to reform. If we had excellent public schools (or lots of urban kids in excellent charter or voucher schools) and they still couldn't overcome the challenges of family dysfunction, then this statement could be plausible. But we're light years away from that.

Do you know the difference between an "alleged father" and a "presumed father?" Your child soon will.

The Texas attorney general's office has created a new parenting curriculum that will be required in every public high school this fall. It will cover everything from the legalese of paternity to dealing with relationship violence.

Governor Rick Perry, not wanting to commit political suicide in his socially conservative state, allowed the bill to become law, though without his signature. And he offered a gem of common sense that should be mailed to all state legislators in the country: "It is always my preference to focus on preserving a high-quality core curriculum that focuses on college and workforce readiness," Mr. Perry said in a statement.

Officials at Bowling Green Junior High say Angelica Hummel must dye her hair back, because the school's dress code prohibits hairstyles that bring undue attention or make the wearer conspicuous.

I know we at Flypaper tend to defer to school leaders' discretion on cultural issues like this, but haven't teenagers been trying to "bring undue attention" to themselves for eons? And isn't this a classic "do as we say, not as we do" situation? As far as I can tell, if workplaces disallowed highlights, most women in Washington, DC would go grey overnight.

Over at NRO, two writers, Carrie Lukas and Kathleen Parker, are displeased about the recent American Association of University Women report that finds education's so-called "boys crisis" to be fiction. Lukas claims that the AAUW simply seeks a monopoly on gender grievance, and Parker claims that boys are, actually, not fine, and that those males who lag academically excel at activities such as abusing drugs and alcohol.

Parker's piece has its rougher patches, but it ends well: Educators should understand that differences between boys and girls exist, and they should develop strategies thereby. (Some principals, in fact, believe single-sex education is the answer.) What's most important is that school leaders have the autonomy to make the educational decisions that work best for their pupils, and that they can do so without worrying about the PC police.

Groups such as the AAUW or The Boys Project, which advocate exclusively on behalf of one gender, are susceptible to doing more harm than good by overstating the problems that their preferred gender faces.??And isn't it rather silly to look at test data and then construct overarching conclusions about all American male or female students?

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Mike Petrilli is one of the nation's foremost education analysts. As president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, he oversees the organization's research projects and publications and contributes to the Flypaper blog and weekly Education Gadfly newsletter.